From the Good Food Awards: Olive Oil Poached Eggs with Italian Chicories and Speck

For two weeks, our friends at the Good Food Awards will be sharing articles, tips, and recipes from some of their judges, friends, and past GFA winners. Each day will feature a different category, from chocolate to charcuterie to cheese. And if you'd like to score some of the goods competing in this year's awards, head to Provisions.

Today: Samin Nosrat shows us a new way to cook with olive oil, and provides a luscious winter salad recipe to complement it.

Professional cook, teacher, and writer Samin Nosrat is, among other things, a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, Michael Pollan’s cooking instructor, and an alumna of the Chez Panisse kitchen. Her book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2015, and she helped launch the Good Food Award oil category for 2013.

Olive-oil poached eggs are like the lovechildren born of an illicit union between poached and fried parents, with both creamy yolks and lacy whites. I like to add them to this salad, which is a simple, low-risk entrée into the wonderful world of olive oil poaching, or confiting. The bitter and bright chicory with smoke and crunch serves as the perfect foil for the eggs.

Olive Oil Poached Eggs with Italian Chicories and Speck

Serves 4

1/2 pound day-old rustic Italian bread, crusts discarded and bread torn into bite-size pieces
Approximately 2 pints extra-virgin olive oil
1 head Italian chicory, such as radicchio, Treviso, or Castelfranco (in a pinch, red Belgian endive will work, too)
1 head frisée
1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1 dash red wine vinegar
3 garlic cloves
4 slices of speck
Sea salt
Black peppercorns and black pepper
4 eggs (farm fresh if possible)

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Photo provided by the Good Food Awards